How Can Living Brain Cells Control a Fighter Jet?

[franznietzsche]

https://www.physicsforums.com/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=149

It sounds like science fiction: a brain nurtured in a Petri dish learns to pilot a fighter plane as scientists develop a new breed of "living" computer. But in groundbreaking experiments in a Florida laboratory that is exactly what is happening.

The "brain", grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida.

my blog post about this: http://maskedslacker.blogspot.com/

 

[honestrosewater]

Wow. Just wanted to point out that the articles I found are from last year, so there may be newer news about this.

 

[motai]

I never heard of this before, then again, I wasn't at this university when the news came out:

The “brain” — a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat’s brain and cultured inside a glass dish — gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorders such as epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene.

As living computers, they may someday be used to fly small unmanned airplanes or handle tasks that are dangerous for humans, such as search-and-rescue missions or bomb damage assessments.

“We’re interested in studying how brains compute,” said Thomas DeMarse, the UF professor of biomedical engineering who designed the study. “If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were 5 years old and you can retrieve information. That’s a tremendous capacity for memory. In fact, you perform fairly simple tasks that you would think a computer would easily be able to accomplish, but in fact it can’t.”

...

“Initially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn’t know how to control the aircraft,” DeMarse said. “So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data comes in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft.”

...

Though the ”brain” can successfully control a flight simulation program, more elaborate applications are a long way off, DeMarse said.

“We’re just starting out. But using this model will help us understand the crucial bit of information between inputs and the stuff that comes out,” he said. “And you can imagine the more you learn about that, the more you can harness the computation of these neurons into a wide range of applications.”

http://news.ufl.edu/2004/10/21/braindish/

It has already been a year, it would be interesting to see where this develops. I haven't read anything in the local newspaper so far, but if anything in the Alligator shows up talking about rat brains flying jets, I'll post it here .

 

[franznietzsche]

Wow. Just wanted to point out that the articles I found are from last year, so there may be newer news about this.

Yeah the article is old, I actually noticed that after posting it.

 

[honestrosewater]

More about their work. http://www.neuro.gatech.edu/groups/potter/papers/DagstuhlAIBakkumpreprint.pdf :

Abstract. We embodied networks of cultured biological neurons in simulation and
in robotics. This is a new research paradigm to study learning, memory, and information
processing in real time: the Neurally-Controlled Animat. Neural activity was
subject to detailed electrical and optical observation using multi-electrode arrays and
microscopy in order to access the neural correlates of animat behavior. Neurobiology
has given inspiration to AI since the advent of the perceptron and consequent
artificial neural networks, developed using local properties of individual neurons.
We wish to continue this trend by studying the network processing of ensembles of
living neurons that lead to higher-level cognition and intelligent behavior.